Have a new i5 windows 7 build with SSD arriving tomorrow. 6 year old XP machine runs some legacy software which I would like on new PC, but only runs on XP, also, I have lost the activation codes to reinstall and the company has gone bankrupt.

I would like to clone the old hard drive (IDE I think) to a new sata drive, then update the drivers so it can boot on the new windows 7 machine exactly the way it was, when that legacy software is needed. (I.e use win7 as primary OS and boot to the old XP installation when needed)

Example here: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Has anyone any experience with this? Is it relatively straight forward? I do not want to put the old PC in jeopardy because I need that program to run regardless. I am OK with computers but have never tried this sort of thing.

Ragnor: Does the legacy software need to interact with hardware directly? If not I would just use vmware converter to turn the old XP install into a VM and that you can run in VM Ware player on the new PC.

Could certainly be worth a shot. I don't think it's hardware specific it's a mapping program for a farm which is no longer supported.

Ragnor: Does the legacy software need to interact with hardware directly? If not I would just use vmware converter to turn the old XP install into a VM and that you can run in VM Ware player on the new PC.

Could certainly be worth a shot. I don't think it's hardware specific it's a mapping program for a farm which is no longer supported.

How would I turn it into a vm? Is there software to do this easily?

Cheers

As mentioned abiove VMWare Converter will convert a physical machine to a VMware VM. If you wish to go down the Hyper V path using Mkicrosoft software they also have a converter.

Great, thanks very much. Have just been reading up about it, it looks relatively straight forward which is awesome.

You asked whether the software was hardware dependent - I presume by that you meant a specific scanner or input tablet or something? I thing it's just a normal program using ram/graphics/CPU etc.

What mileage have people has using a vm? Is it laggy at all, does the XP install feel snappier running on an SSD and new intel processed with lots of ram? We will only use it for this one bit of software, but it will be used often...

Generally speaking creating a VM using VMWare converter is very easy (just follow the wizard) and performance will be decent running in VMWare Player on a modern machine like your new one.

You have nothing to loose so just try it: Install VMWare Converter on the XP machine create a VM image saving to a network share or external USB drive, copy the image to a folder on the new machine, setup VMWare player on the new machine and load the image.